🇯🇵 Everyone knows Hitler, but hardly anyone remembers Hideki Tojo, Japan's PM during WW2. During his time, Imperial Japan butchered its way across Asia, killing millions of civilians through mass executions, chemical warfare, forced starvation, human experiments, and industrial-scale sexual slavery. In Nanking alone, people were bayoneted, burned alive, buried alive, and raped by the tens of thousands while Japanese officers reportedly held killing contests with swords like it was a game. Unit 731 froze babies alive, dissected prisoners without anesthesia, tested plague bombs on civilians, and treated human beings like lab rats. Then after the war? Many of the people responsible walked free because the U.S. decided Japan would make a useful anti-Soviet ally. Some were quietly rehabilitated into politics, business, academia, and medicine. Meanwhile, Germany became the global symbol of evil, while Japan became “the poor victims of the atomic bombings” and eventually the land of anime, sushi, Nintendo, and Hello Kitty. Imagine if senior Nazi officials got Disneyland tours and media rehabilitation campaigns within one generation. That’s essentially what happened. Source: Smithsonian, Britannica, National WWII Museum